The Cannibal by John Hawkes Page B

smoking holes, the
     engine, no larger than the torso of a man, blasting, whistling, coughing stupidly. It
     swooped over mother and girl, flapped its fins once, and crashed, typically English, on the
     other side of the
Platz
. Paper and wood burned quickly, consumed the flyers,
     leaving the isinglass still intact over their eyes. In so falling with its mechanical
     defect,the plane sent a splinter flying into the mother’s breast that
     knocked her down.
    The policeman kept pushing Stella by the shoulder while the half-dressed
     crowd asked again and again, “What happened to the old trumpet?” What happened was that they
     stumbled out into the street and came upon an old dead woman, kicked around, bent, black.
     “What are you pushing me for?” The sweet grass burned back in the passageway of the street,
     the old medium was so wrapped in smoke that the father’s second voice, this mother, was
     choked, mute, with cinders in the cleft of her chin and above the open lips.
    “Gavrilo,” Stella murmured, “what have you done?”
    The birds twittered in angelic surmise, reeled high and low, fed, nested,
     called beyond the curtains in gentle mockery, and the days passed by with the temperate
     clime of summer stones. The marble dust fell in rest; leaded curtains, lately drawn, hung
     padded and full across the sunlight, keepers of the room. The seascapes were gone, no
     shadows were on the walls, silver flukes that seemed arisen from the past hushed their soft
     seashell voices and at every dead night or noon, she missed the chiming of the bells. Her
     mourning was a cold wave, a dry flickering of fingers in departure, a gesture resting softly
     in her throat that barely disturbed the gentle shift of light passing on its way. It was
     always dusk, rising, waking, falling with indolence, resounding carefully in her sleep,
     reporting the solitude of each daypast. Stella thought the bier was
     close by. That perpetual afternoon clawed about her knees, each day the spirit grew more
     dim, sheltered behind the heavy lost mask of falling air, the thick south receding.
    Those ships that had once rolled in on the breakers were cold and thin and
     had traveled far beyond her sorrow. The mother’s hands were crossed, the wrinkles had
     strangely deepened until the face was gone, the flowers were turning a cold earthen brown.
     Her black collar was aslant on the neck, her own mother’s ring before her was tucked into a
     hasty satin crevice by her side, wrapped in paper. They sprinkled water about trying to keep
     the air fresh, and the trimmings began to tarnish. In the evening the face changed color.
     Sweetness arose from the little pillows; she wore no stockings or shoes and the hair,
     brittle and thin, clipped together, was hard to manage. The eyelids swelled and no one
     visited.
    Stella waited, awake on the chair, listening to the hushed footsteps, her
     face in the constant pose of a circus boy, misshapen, cold, her isolation unmoved with
     memory, numb with summer. The mourning of the virgin, as if she were swept close, now, for
     the first time, to the mother’s sagging breast for her first dance, was heightened in a
     smile as the orchestra rose up and they glided over the empty avenue, the old woman in
     starched collar leading, tripping. Those dry unyielding fingers brushed her on, poised,
     embarrassed by the face that never moved. She did not stop, seeing many other eyeless
     dancers, lured through her first impression of this season, clear and rare, but she waited,
     sitting, hour on hour. Those fingers rustled in the dark. She heard the perpetual scratching
     feet of insects who walked over the coffin lid with their blue wings, their dotted eyes, and
     an old bishop mumbled as he ran his fingers over the rectangle of edges closed with wax.
     They tried tocurl the hair, but the iron was too hot and burned. Her
     nostrils, rather than dilated in grief, were drawn closely, dispassionately together, making